Court rules Pentagon can blacklist Anthropic for refusing to enable Claude features

The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit ruled 2-1 to approve the Department of Defense's blacklisting of Anthropic technology, finding the government may restrict the company even absent malice for refusing to open some Claude features to the military. The opinion weighed the risk that restricted models could disrupt military operations against the risk that unrestricted models could hallucinate wrong strike targets, held the defense secretary did not overstep, and rejected Anthropic's request for a rehearing. The court had previously denied its emergency stay request in April.